Recently, one of the more fanciful ones was that he was tired of being in debt and that he had sold his pastoral empire to an international meat company for $1 billion.

That would have been a big story, if there had been one scintilla of truth in it.

The South Australian pastoralist, who owns more than 100 properties spread across more than 400,000 hectares (about 1 million acres in the old money), is notoriously tight-lipped about his business affairs.

So tongues really started wagging in June last year when he bought 18,000 cattle from several stations in the Gulf of Carpentaria and had them trucked about 1,000 kilometres to Winton and Longreach in western Queensland.

From there he employed a team of drovers, had the cattle split into mobs of 2,000, and started walking them southwards along the travelling stock routes.

The deal, worth about $7 million, was the largest purchase of cattle by one vendor in Australian history.

Such a droving feat on this large a scale had not been done since colonial days.

Sir Sidney was once the largest landholder in the world with an empire created by continually moving thousands of cattle across the Australian inland to where the grass was better.

Surely by using drovers following traditional stock routes to shift his vast herd, Mr Brinkworth was paying homage to the great cattle drives of Australia's past?

"At the time it just seemed like a good idea and it looked [like] an opportunity to move cattle to where we wanted them later on," Mr Brinkworth said.

"And I thought things were pretty crook in the north and droughty; cattle had to go somewhere and I thought at the time we'd want cattle, so we had a look and bought some."

It is as simple and as unsentimental as that.

Rains arrived ahead of epic trek

Mr Brinkworth is a voracious reader, passionate about Australian history, but not one to allow tradition to impede his business.

In August 2012, when he paid an estimated $30 million for the historic Uardry sheep station on the Murrumbidgee River near Hay, he had not even inspected beforehand the historic homestead and the priceless heritage that came with it.

We were waiting for feed to come and move some other cattle, so we weren't in a hurry to move them and I thought that was a possible opportunity. We thought it might be feasible so that's the way we went.

Tom Brinkworth

Then he sold off and disbanded the sheep Merino stud which dated back to 1865, much to the chagrin of many in the district. Some likened him to a corporate raider.

He concedes that when he embarked on this journey of around 2,000 kilometres the ducks all seemed to line up.

The Riverina region had experienced good winter rains and the forecast for the inland plains over which the cattle would walk looked promising.

The odds suggested his newly purchased cattle would soon be wading in knee-high pasture.

"We weren't in a hurry to get the cattle," Mr Brinkworth said of his decision to move them on the hoof rather than have them trucked.

"We were waiting for feed to come and move some other cattle, so we weren't in a hurry to move them and I thought that was a possible opportunity, so we thought it might be feasible so that's the way we went."

The cattle represented a bargain: well-bred young females sold by the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo) went for about $400 per head.

Droving through Queensland's most widespread drought

In June last year AACo needed to lighten off its stocking rate. The wet season in the Gulf region had been poor and grass was scarce. The company had excess cattle because of the disruption to the live export trade and it needed some cash flow.

"But things really didn't go with us that well," Mr Brinkworth said, speaking publicly for the first time about his giant cattle trek.

"It didn't go that well coming down through Queensland and it didn't rain down here much. That's the way it happens."

As the cattle moved at a rate of about 10 kilometres a day, the increasing dry seemed to stalk them at every step of the way. No-one could have foreseen the venture would confront the most widespread drought in Queensland's history.

I don't think some of the cattle even knew what it was to get their backs wet.

Tom Brinkworth

"It never rained from the day he bought those cattle," said Dave Fenton, a full-time drover currently walking cattle in western New South Wales.

Mr Brinkworth agrees.

"I don't think some of the cattle even knew what it was to get their backs wet. I always thought, it'll rain, she'll be right. She'll rain. But it didn't really rain," he said.

By early September, after three months on the road, the first of the cattle mobs crossed the border into New South Wales.

Originally Mr Brinkworth had planned to bring the cattle along the stock routes further west, but dry conditions had quickly ruled that out.

By the time the drove had reached the Coonamble district further south, grass was so scarce that some of the backmarkers had to be loaded onto trucks and sent on to the Condobolin district.

Who was Sir Sidney Kidman?

LandlineTom Brinkworth has been compared to the 'Cattle King' Sir Sidney Kidman. Watch Landline's story from last year to find out more about the traditional pastoralist.

"With the cattle that were trucked, we were quite happy about that because we didn't want to be dead heroes," head drover Bill Little told Landline at the time.

"The wellbeing of the cattle comes first. I had deadlines where I'd say 'that's it, these cattle aren't going to walk any further, we've got to get them on a truck', because we didn't want dead cattle laying along the stock route anywhere."

As the cattle drive neared their destination in the New South Wales Riverina, scorching temperatures and shrinking dams along the stock route meant added, unforeseen costs such as using water tankers and portable troughs to deliver crucial water.

But apart from the odd fatality from snake bite and a few deaths from a road train crashing into one mob, the cattle all made it south in mobs generally spaced more than a week apart.

The first cattle mob reached Uardry Station on Christmas Eve. The last of them arrived several weeks ago, all in sound condition.

They are currently enjoying some green fodder, courtesy of irrigated lucerne crops, but will soon be sent to several Brinkworth Pastoral properties in north-east South Australia.

A nod to the great 'Cattle King'

The similarities with Sir Sidney's methods of moving cattle half way across the continent are all too evident.

Mr Brinkworth acknowledges the exercise was a bit of a nod to the great Cattle King.